The 52-year-old Cattelan has acquired the image of an international playboy:
he is referred to as “the art world’s court jester”, writes Mark
Hudson.

On the floor in a corner of the Whitechapel Gallery, a stuffed red squirrel sits with its head on a tiny but meticulously crafted formica table, a revolver lying on the floor below. This Lilliputian suicide scenario — so small you could step on it before you’ve noticed it — dramatises the teenage angst of its creator, Maurizio Cattelan. The setting recreates the apartment in Padua, down to the dirty dishes in the sink, where this glitzy trickster artist spent unhappy formative years.

Best known in this country for The Ninth Hour, a life-size tableau of Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite, shown at the Royal Academy in 2000, the 52-year-old Cattelan

has acquired the image of an international playboy: he is referred to as “the art world’s court jester” — quite an achievement in a scene that is hardly short of bad-boy pranksters.

This small but interesting selection of works shows a more serious Cattelan locked in an intense, troubled relationship with Italy.

On entering, we see a disembodied hand, fingerless except for the middle digit, pointing towards a circular carpet woven in the design of the Bel Paese cheese label with its stylised map of Italy. Further on, we encounter a canvas sack full of rubble that looks as though it might have been left there by mistake by the installers, and a neon logo that any Italian would recognise as the emblem of the Red Brigades terrorist group transformed into a banal Christmas decoration.

Cattelan himself is seen in a half life-size waxwork, wearing German artist Joseph Beuys’s iconic grey felt suit, dangling helplessly from a coat hook as though left there in some schoolboy prank. On Cattelan the suit, redolent of Beuys’s heroic idealism, appears comically pathetic.

This apparently blank display, of eight exhibits in all, feels like a puzzle, with the viewer left to guess the links between the objects. And whether by accident or design the assemblage adds up to a kind of personal portrait of Italy.

We need to know that the rubble comes from a Milan art gallery blown up by the Mafia during the 1993 “Clean Hands” anti-corruption campaign. The hand is based on a gigantic Roman sculpture, an image that is iconic in Italy, as of course is the cheese label. While hand and carpet are separate works not intended to be seen together, the exhibition’s juxtaposition creates all sorts of associations: a mutilated version of the ancient past, perhaps, pointing towards a clichéd vision of modern Italian “beauty”.

If that sounds a touch pat, there’s a poignant feel to this display, and a surprising sense of connectedness to things that matter to people beyond the art world.

There’s a similar sense of cultural rootedness in the work of Thomas Schütte at the Serpentine. His exhibition revolves round a massive, but apparently armless male figure in thickly rusted cast iron, which looms over the gallery’s central room, haloed by the lights. The scale of the work is impressive, but what we’re to make of it and the rather lumpen sculptures and drawings in the surrounding rooms is another matter.

Schütte is preoccupied — like many German artists — with power, monumentality and history. But rather than attempting to evolve a personal style or language, he adopts different approaches to suit his purposes. The results often feel strangely arbitrary. The central work, Father-State, is in a vaguely Buddhist mode. The grotesque Siamese-twin figures in the gardens and a series of busts, again of “power figures”, entitled Jerks, bring a touch of cack-handed Expressionism, while the large numbers of portrait drawings nod occasionally towards the Renaissance.

Schütte appears to be exploring archetypal means for representing and debunking power.

Beyond that, though, the exhibition remains enigmatic. I’m all for shows that don’t offer trite explanations, but for once a little more factual information wouldn’t go amiss.